New Old Furniture

For a long time, we have been looking for a piece of furniture for our living room to go under the large mirror. Ideally, we would have purchased something secondhand, but the dimensions we needed were too specific. As a result, we shopped for a new piece, and wound up purchasing an antique, (approximately 75 years old) Mongolian cabinet. The store owner said the blue color is quite rare. We are super pleased with how it looks in the space.

While shopping for this piece, we casually glanced at other furniture in hopes of finding a reasonably priced cabinet for our office. That plan didn’t work out so well, because we came home with a very rare, antique, Chinese wedding cabinet. We (mostly Erik) totally fell in love with the piece and bought it with plans to keep it forever. It is approximately 150 years old and the in-tact carving is very hard to find. This cabinet is the most expensive piece of furniture we have ever purchased. Not that we plan to sell it, but the shop owner said we could easily sell it tomorrow in the US for double what we paid. It is living in our guest bedroom.

Note about shopping in Hong Kong: a hard concept to grasp at first is the fact that there are no big-box stores that sell everything, e.g. Walmart, Target, etc. Stores selling similar items are usually located near one another. A great example of this shopping concept is Horizon Plaza, where we purchased these two new pieces of furniture. Horizon Plaza is a 28 story mall filled with virtually all furniture stores. Needless to say, you get pretty bleary eyed and worn down shopping there.